Feature Requests

Apps & Remote Access Control Cube (iOS)
#1

Your Feedback is important to us.

Even though we have a Product Roadmap published on our website: [url=http://www.control-cube.com/roadmap.html]http://www.control-cube.com/roadmap.html[/url], We still highly value your feedback and take it into consideration and in many cases modify our priorities.

So please let us what you want and we will work on getting it done.

#2

Smaller logo might be nice, currently it takes up a large portion of the screen along with the rest of the header. It’s nice to have the weather forecast shown but perhaps not at the expense of other data that’s useful.

#3

Bought control cube and it’s very nice interface and quite responsive…

Works great with vera and lighting.

For lighting, would like to see 2 features…

  • a cover page like Simplewave that shows the “status” of items in the house…ex/ 12/24 lights on or something like that. Easy to let me know at a glance if and how many lights are on.
  • to piggy back on that feature, maybe highlight the room that has a light on in the “room tab” on the left. Again, make it very easy and quick for the user to know what’s on and where.

Nest however is having a little difficulties. I’d like to see the ability to set the temperature (cool/heat) in a much better way. Right now, when you tap on the climate icon, it displays the current temp but not what it is set at. Then you have a +/- to change the set temp, but they start at 0 instead of the current set temp. Once I start tapping +/-, after about 3 taps, I get an error message “No Connection”.

Will continue to test and let you know what features would be desired…

#4

Hi,

I just purchased Control Cube, or iControlCube, and would like to know if Plex control could be added or if XBMC setup could be adjusted to suit Plex. Some details are here: https://forums.plex.tv/index.php/topic/84037-plex-http-api/

#5

Bump.

#6

Cool, a month since my question and no response…

So far, I would not suggest anyone get this app.

#7

@rtaxerxes: Sorry mate, plex is not on our agenda for integration any time soon. Plus the link you posted does not contain any API information about that system.
Regards from Control Cube.

#8

Thanks for the reply.

The details are in this post (https://forums.plex.tv/index.php/topic/84037-plex-http-api/?p=539847), but more details are here (Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.). Plex is a fork of XBMC, so I would assume it would be the same or similar.

Perhaps an option to change the port so it could work with Plex.

#9

In Control Cube 2.8. XBMC is now controlled via port 8080. But I use JSON RPC rather than the basic HTTP command which that forum post you linked to shows.

Quick googling shows that plea does support JSON rpc. I honestly have never tried plex. Can you try and check if port 8080 works on the latest Control Cube? or Is it fixed at port 32400 as per that post?

#10

Hi,

You should really try Plex, they have ported it to just about everything (Linux, Windows, Mac, Raspberry Pi, NAS, etc) and it has a server client setup so the media server can sit on a NAS or server and everything becomes a client.

I believe the JSON port on Plex is 3005 for the Plex Home Theater client. Port 32400 is for the server. I managed to change the port 3005 to 8080 in the guisettings.xml file and it does work! So perhaps you could add a Plex option working off port 3005?

#11

Any plans to implement home, away, night, vacation modes from UI7?

They are main features of the smarthome and would be nice to have.

#12

Hi GR,

Thanks for the comment and for using Control Cube. I will put your request on our pipeline.

Meanwhile, Are you able to run these modes from Luup code on a scene? As a temp solution you can create 4 scenes (home/away/night/vacation) and this way you can control them from control cube. Of course the more native and obvious solution would be to support them directly through the app.

Regards.

#13

[quote=“hadiesper, post:12, topic:179523”]Hi GR,

Thanks for the comment and for using Control Cube. I will put your request on our pipeline.

Meanwhile, Are you able to run these modes from Luup code on a scene? As a temp solution you can create 4 scenes (home/away/night/vacation) and this way you can control them from control cube. Of course the more native and obvious solution would be to support them directly through the app.

Regards.[/quote]
Thanks! Good to hear. I am not sure about running them from a scene. I will have a look at it when I get the chance.

As far as I can remember you do a lot of setups around professionally? I am guessing away/home mode etc. is a quite common request in a smarthome? How do you normally set it up? (and before UI7?)

#14

Hi GR,

Yes I do a lot of professional setups. But almost all my setups are in large luxury homes that can have anywhere from 5-12 Vera’s in 1 house. So for us, the home and away mode in one Vera serves no functional purpose since it would need to span multiple Vera’s and you would need to combine multiple scenes across multiple Vera’s to achieve the home or away modes.

So for example, if we want to create an “away” button that turns off all the lighting and closes all the curtains, we would set up a scene on 1 vera (call it away scene) and put in luup code that would run other scenes like “all off” on Vera’s 2,3,4,5,6…etc.

#15

Thanks for that, hadiesper. As of now I have just setup scenes for those four scenarios, and put them in a “room” called “Main screen” which we always have the wall mounted iPad in the hall showing. The official Vera app also supports iPad now since the latest version a few days back, and it has the mode buttons on the main screen (called dashboard), but Control Cube looks SO much better!

However since mounting the iPad in wall always connected to power and always on, I have noticed that the weather and time in app does not update until I switch room. Weather updates when using the update-button, but the time does not. I would really appreciate if you could look into that.

Another thing that is annoying is while configuring the system there is always a lot of changes, testing, new devices, new scenes. Control Cube does not update until I clear the database and readds the Z-Wave Controller, but then all the section configuration is lost, and I have to setup all the floors and add each room to correct floor every time. Any chance an update or “re-add” function could be added? Or have I misunderstood anything?

#16

Hi GR. Thank you for the feedback. I am so happy that you like Control Cube!

Regarding Weather updates. This will happen when you press the refresh app. Honestly I have not been able to find a good weather API to support control cube. Most have a limit on the number of requests. The one I have now has 1000 request per day limit and that limit is exceeded everyday, so I do need to switch it to another service. But I am a bit inexperienced in this realm so if you or anyone else can give me some suggestions I would really appreciate it. But you are right, updating of time and weather is not real time and will have to be fixed.

Regarding your next question. You should be able to re-add the same vera without creating duplicate devices. In some cases it doesn’t work properly and creates duplicates and this is why I created a device called “VERA Manual Scene” this will enable you to add a specific scene using the scene ID (but only works for scenes). I will work on improving that as well.

Thanks again for the feedback.

#17

Apparantly I’ve done it wrong then. I thought one had to clear the database first. Don’t know why that was my logic, but I will try without clearing next time then.

I understand the issues with the weather polling, but when it comes to the time that should be easy to get real time?

As for the 1000 poll a day limit for weather, I would think that should be sufficient for anyone? However I have no experience in app developing and don’t know how it is all connected. If possible I would say stop updating on key press and instead update weather every 15 minutes. That would be 96 updates every day. Or maybe the built-in weather function in iOS allows polling more often?

#18

Hi GR, the 1000 polls a day is the limit to all user of Control Cube worldwide not for each individual, this is why this plan is not sufficient as it caps out every day and I need to find an alternative weather api.

I don’t think there is any service providing free unlimited real time access to weather. It would make sense though if apple has an api to access the same weather service as the weather app uses. But honestly, I need to read a bit more about this topic and see what is the best option moving forward.